Lourdes Garcia-Navarro

Lulu Garcia-Navarro is the host of Weekend Edition Sunday. She is infamous in the IT department of NPR for losing laptops to bullets, hurricanes, and bomb blasts.

Before joining the Sunday morning team, she served as an NPR correspondent based in Brazil, Israel, Mexico, and Iraq. She was one of the first reporters to enter Libya after the 2011 Arab Spring uprising began and spent months painting a deep and vivid portrait of a country at war. Often at great personal risk, Garcia-Navarro captured history in the making with stunning insight, courage, and humanity.

For her work covering the Arab Spring, Garcia-Navarro was awarded a 2011 George Foster Peabody Award, a Lowell Thomas Award from the Overseas Press Club, an Edward R. Murrow Award from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the Alliance for Women and the Media's Gracie Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement. She contributed to NPR News reporting on Iraq, which was recognized with a 2005 Peabody Award and a 2007 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton. She has also won awards for her work on migration in Mexico and the Amazon in Brazil.

Garcia-Navarro got her start in journalism as a freelancer with the BBC World Service and Voice of America. She later became a producer for Associated Press Television News before transitioning to AP Radio. While there, Garcia-Navarro covered post-September 11 events in Afghanistan and developments in Jerusalem. She was posted for the AP to Iraq before the U.S.-led invasion, where she stayed covering the conflict.

Garcia-Navarro holds a Bachelor of Science degree in International Relations from Georgetown University and an Master of Arts degree in journalism from City University in London.

At the Vdara Hotel and Spa in Las Vegas, robots are at the front line of room service. "Jett" and "Fetch" are delivery robots, designed to look like dogs, each about three feet high.

They can bring items from the hotel's cafe right to your room. Among their many capabilities, they can travel alone across the lobby, remotely call for an elevator, and even alert guests when they arrive at their hotel room through an automated phone message.

The word "first" comes up a lot when talking about the latest album from Cat Power. It's the singer's first in six years, her first since giving birth to a son (notice his forehead peeking out on the album cover) and her first since leaving Matador, her longtime record label. But one thing is not new: As is often the case with Cat Power's music, this collection is spare and emotional.

For all the talk of how Democrats running for re-election in states President Trump won are a protective shield for Senate Republicans, Nevada's Dean Heller has the opposite problem.

He is the only Republican senator up for re-election in a state that Democrat Hillary Clinton won in 2016. The candidate challenging him for the seat is Democratic Rep. Jacky Rosen. "Right now, the Republicans have all three branches of government," Rosen said. "So what we can do is try to hold their feet to the fire every way we can, because we don't have the votes to win."

Sarah Smarsh grew up in rural Kansas — the fifth generation to farm the same land, riding tractors where her ancestors rode wagons. There was never enough money and prospects were few. She was part of the what has become popularized as the white working class. But back then, she didn't know it.

Like their counterparts across the country, Wisconsin Democrats eager to win back the House and make gains in the Senate have been watching primary election voter turnout with bated breath. This week, they found reason to be hopeful: turnout in the state's primary on Tuesday soared to its highest level since 2002, with a surge in Democratic votes.

Janet Clark hopes to keep her dairy farm in the family. She inherited Vision Aire Farms from her parents, and now runs it with her younger brother.

The farm is idyllic, tucked away amid rolling green hills of corn and sunflower fields. One side of the farm holds a line of calves. They are individually fed by Clark's children and their cousins, playfully holding milk bottles for them to drink.

Mexican actor Diego Luna first shot to fame in the United States after 2001's Y Tu Mamá También. Since then, he's starred in a handful of blockbusters — including, recently, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story — and he's about to play the leader of a drug cartel in the upcoming season of Netflix's Narcos.

Luna could have happily continued to live a successful life in Hollywood, but he missed Mexico. At a café near his kids' school in Mexico City, he explains why.

On March 16, 2017, Albino Quiroz Sandoval popped out of the house around 5 p.m. for a little trip to the shop. The 71-year-old lives in Tepoztlán, a small colonial town with little crime, a weekend getaway from hectic Mexico City. Quiroz had been a public school teacher for 48 years. Everyone knows him.

By 8 p.m., he wasn't home. His family grew worried. His son Juan Carlos Quiroz, who was a 90-minute drive away in Mexico City, got a frantic call from his sister.

"We didn't know what to do," Juan Carlos recalls. "My sister and I thought it could be a kidnapping."

The NPR Music Tiny Desk Contest may be over this year — NPR Music was proud to award the honor this year to Naia Izumi — but Weekend Edition isn't done highlighting the impressive talent who entered this year's contest.

Eight years ago, we introduced two unlikely friends: an Israeli and a Palestinian -- who once believed peace could override enemy lines. Dana Levy and Mohammed Saqar met in the late 1990s, as teenagers at a Seeds of Peace summer camp in the U.S.

Both had lost family in the region's conflicts, but they became friends and kept in touch by phone.

We caught up with both of them. But not together. We should tell you, this is a missed connection we could not reconnect.